


[not my ugly side]

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: [to see you there] [10]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 10:21:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1424914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fight technically starts over coffee - specifically, over who needs to get up and refill the coffee cups - and then it sort of mushrooms from there. Or maybe <em>branches out</em> is a better way of describing it, because it gets way the hell and gone off topic pretty quick, rapidly covering the ground of "but I always get the coffee" and moving onto "maybe we should ask Tony for one of those Nespresso machines" and from there escalating happily up into every single one of Betty's instincts screaming that there has <em>got</em> to be a catch to that, even if her logic has basically accepted there isn't, mixing uncomfortably with all of the irrational discomfort with asking for <em>more stuff</em> that she'll never be rid of, jumping track over to whether or not they're being wasteful, and finally the volume dials itself up until Bruce stands up from the table with his hands on his hips and half-shouts, "And this isn't even <em>about</em> the coffee, is it?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	[not my ugly side]

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted at my journal; tidied up a bit since MCU is back on my mind and posted where it belongs.
> 
> eta jan21 2017: further tidied up to smooth away some small continuity glibbles with the rest of this verse.

The fight technically starts over coffee - specifically, over who needs to get up and refill the coffee cups - and then it sort of mushrooms from there. Or maybe _branches out_ is a better way of describing it, because it gets way the hell and gone off topic pretty quick, rapidly covering the ground of "but I always get the coffee" and moving onto "maybe we should ask Tony for one of those Nespresso machines" and from there escalating happily up into every single one of Betty's instincts screaming that there has _got_ to be a catch to that, even if her logic has basically accepted there isn't, mixing uncomfortably with all of the irrational discomfort with asking for _more stuff_ that she'll never be rid of, jumping track over to whether or not they're being wasteful, and finally the volume dials itself up until Bruce stands up from the table with his hands on his hips and half-shouts, "And this isn't even _about_ the coffee, is it?"

“No!" Betty finds herself shouting back. "Of course it's not about the coffee! For fuck's sake Bruce Banner do you really think I would be this upset about _coffee_? Who the hell do you think I am?”

"Right!" Bruce says, jabbing a finger at her, "This is about the fact that you're still mad at me for leaving! It is, isn’t it!”

"Of course it is!" Betty snaps. “That’s a completely ridiculous question! What the hell else would I be mad about, _coffee_?”

"Well, fine!” Bruce snaps right back, "here's _another_ ridiculous question, okay - _now what?_ "

It's . . . a reasonable question. With the real reason she's picking fights acknowledged, keeping on with this one seems kind of stupid, even if she still _feels_ angry. And actually, Betty's kind of pleased with herself, in the second she takes to take a breath to answer, while all the rest of her brain actually kicks in. She worries, sometimes, that some of the mainstream stupidity crept in while she wasn't looking, the assumptions, even Bruce's _own_ assumptions. That it got into her head in the time between standing in front of what Bruce had become on that lawn before the explosion, and now. That she might have got shaken out of what she _knows_ into what everyone else believes.

It's nice to have reminders that it hasn't; that when she says, _I'm not afraid of you_ , she's telling the truth as well as making a promise. Nice to notice that not until _after_ Bruce asked _now what? _that she even thought to _wonder_ about, say, JARVIS keeping an eye on Bruce's vitals. Or that they might need keeping an eye on, or that this was anything other than a totally normal - if completely _stupid_ \- fight about the coffee. __

She wonders if the Hulk would even like coffee. Most kids don't, and as far as she can tell, the Hulk is pretty kid-like. Maybe if there was a lot of sugar in it. Actually, it occurs to her, they haven’t yet established if the Hulk _eats_. She already knows absolutely nobody really understands when she tries to explain that she and Bruce have stupid fights partly because Bruce is the only person who's ever been in her life she feels safe having stupid fights _with_. They especially won't understand now.

Betty takes another breath, drawing herself up. She exhales carefully, and gestures with one hand, uses the other to pull her glasses off - and no she doesn't want contacts _thank you_ Tony, and no, no LASIK either - and press a knuckle against the bridge of her nose.

"No," she says, dropping about an octave in pitch and a lot of volume. It's the answer to the question he didn't quite ask. "No, okay, this is done, this is stupid. We talked about this, we chewed it over, I am processing it, I'm just apparently mad at you again, but it would be stupid to have a fight over it. Again."

He relaxes slightly and she puts her glasses back on. She's wearing them more now; it's getting to be a habit again, like it was when she was a student. It’s actually kind of nice. Nobody cares that they make her look younger here. You’d think this would be the _last_ place she could stop worrying about her image and just focus on her work, but it’s kind of delightful to her that you’d be wrong. And she doesn't care where it is: if she's actually found somewhere she can do that, she will take it.

"Okay," Bruce says, also dropping the volume. "We're done fighting about the coffee." He gestures to the cups, as if just to be sure. Betty makes a face at him.

"Yes," she says, with a sigh, letting both arms fall. "And I'm . . .I'm going to go for a walk. I think that's a good idea right now."

"Probably," Bruce says. "Walks can be very calming."

Betty shoots him a warning look, and he holds up both hands in silent apology. She's actually a bit too worked up right now to take him teasing her very well, even if it is the dead-pan invisible earnest teasing of Bruce Banner when he's being a shit and even if - perhaps especially because - she spent a long time missing it desperately. And that's probably why, as she steps out of the door, she stops and jabs a finger at him and says, "Don't disappear while I'm gone," and gets the satisfaction of seeing him wince slightly before she closes the door. It's a little bit petty. But she can live with that.

 

All things considered, she could probably use a therapist, Betty knows. Dating Leo pretty much took the tinge of the strange or the embarrassing off the idea for her. And one of the things therapists are good for is working out, for instance, the residual anger at the love of your life for things he did that you have, in fact, discussed, that he has actually apologized for and that, _in a fair universe_ , where human brains worked in any kind of reasonable way, should be past history. And sometimes aren't, like when he suggests Tony Stark should buy something, and she remembers that Bruce was working on the Tesseract with Tony while she was still afraid Bruce was dead.

Therapists are good at that kind of thing because you don't have to worry about hurting their feelings or if they're going to like you tomorrow or if you're being fair enough to their point of view. The only problem is, at this point, all the secrets she'd need to tell to make what she needs to talk about even make sense, and how dangerous that would be. And she's not up to figuring that out right now, in part - ironically enough - because she's too busy trying to field her feelings about . . . all of this. About being here, about Bruce, about Bruce being somewhere, and then working on the Tesseract with Tony while she thought he was dead (maybe, probably dead, but maybe not dead, which made it worse), and then Bruce saving the world instead and still not coming to find her, and why, and how they've seriously talked about this and it should be easier to let it  _go_. 

She's not mad at Tony. She's not even really mad at Bruce. She's just . . . angry. Sometimes. At everything.

How many people would ever believe that, she doesn't know. 

Betty takes the elevator down out of the private floors of Stark Tower and then switches to the stairs for the exercise. She's about halfway down before the prickle at the back of her neck is enough that it makes her stop and say to the empty air behind her, "If you want to live the rest of your life with all your limbs attached and you want that life to be longer than it takes to track you by scent, then I cannot emphasise enough how _bad_ an idea it is to assault or kidnap me."

She remembers, as she says it. Actually, she always remembers. It's one of the things carved metaphorically into the back of her eyelids, burned on her soul, that erupts in her nightmares of burning to death: the way her screaming on the quad turned the sonic canons into irrelevant toys, the way the minute the Abomination lost was also the moment the Hulk - Bruce - thought she was going to die, the way part of why she is absolutely sure that it's just him, just different facets of him in different circumstances, is how tightly the world for the Hulk seems to revolve around her being safe.

After a pause, a familiar voice says, "I was about to say that's a terrible line, but it's also pretty accurate, so fair enough.”

Betty turns to the sound of feet hitting the clean smooth concrete of the stairs and tries to decide exactly how she feels about Agent Barton dropping from one level up and standing there, in what appears to be his out-of-uniform uniform of comfortable jeans and a leather-jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. His sunglasses are perched on top of his head. He has to have been climbing around on the underside of the stairs and other stuff, but he doesn't even seem out of breath. 

As she thinks that, it also occurs to Betty that there is no way in hell JARVIS would let any hostile or unknown person to use these stairs unless the building really was on fire, and if they tried it'd probably end badly, so being kidnapped  _in_ the Tower is probably not something she needs to worry about. 

"Well done," Agent Barton says. "I honestly didn't expect you to notice."

"I had a stalker when I was a freshman," she says, evenly. "I grew good instincts." She tries not to think about him much. The nightmares can still pop up if she's not careful. 

Barton tilts his head, looks intrigued. Betty wonders if all SHIELD people are all weird and slightly inappropriately ghoulish, and then thinks they probably have to be. "What happened to him?" he asks. 

"He's in a military prison for the rest of his life," she says, then when his eyebrows rise she relents a little and adds, "Not over me. He got caught after he raped someone else."

"I somehow don't think stalking a general's daughter had _nothing_ to do with his sentence, though," Barton says, with a crook of a smile and Betty shrugs. 

She'd testified. She never  _told_ her father about it, but the guy had been military, and the General probably found out. Nothing she did made a difference either way, though. 

"So why are _you_ stalking me?" she asks, pointedly shifting the subject away from that little piece of personal history. Barton raises a finger as if in objection.

"Not stalking," he says. " _Stalking_ implies a violent endgame, which, thank you: I _saw_ your boyfriend punch a demon space-whale to death - with one punch! - and that's a little excessive as a death wish. Not stalking. Following."

Betty narrows her eyes at him as he talks, and notices maybe a little bit more nervous motion than he's had in previous conversations and since she's having a Day anyway and, let's be clear, he _did_ stalk her out here, she interrupts with a shot in the dark and says, "Agent Romanoff's out of the country, isn't she."

Barton stops his nit-picking explanation in the middle of drawing a breath and Betty gets a new look from him. It's appraising, but it's open about being appraising and she thinks maybe she just graduated some kind of strange level system in his head. It's also . . . not hostile, not defensive, but like someone just realized there's a danger they hadn't seen before, and are reassessing everything around them. And a little like someone waiting for something painful to happen. 

"Why do you say that?" he asks. The question sounds like he wants to know her reasoning, not like he's challenging what she said. Betty can't shake what she just thought, about waiting for something painful. It nags at the back of her mind and now she kind of regrets the prod. He has, she knows, recently been through a lot of shit.

She puts her hands in the pockets of the coat she'd grabbed before leaving and shrugs. "You're here following me," she says. "And she's not here making friends."

It's truthful. If she hadn't felt like backing off a bit, though, what she'd've said is,  _You're here following me and I'm going nowhere, so you've got to be desperate for a distraction._  

The appraising look gets a little sharper, and Betty distractedly thinks that Leonard would have had a _field day_ with these people. A totally inappropriate one - he always admitted he feels a little guilty about his delight in figuring out the puzzles of human minds and how it showed in subtle body signs and facial tics - but still. Betty's not even sure if Clint's just honing in on her knowing that Natasha's making friends on purpose, or if maybe he heard her unspoken aborted answer. Leonard might. 

Damn it. She owes him an email. Actually she owes him coffee and maybe dinner. He’s been ridiculously understanding about everything. It’s nice to have her taste in men reaffirmed as excellent, but she still feels a bit guilty.

And she _has_ noticed that Natasha Romanoff really wants to be friends. Or at least, she thinks she's noticed. Most people might not, but most people weren't a shy nerd girl who, when she was eleven, had braces and glasses that were a lot less flattering than the ones she wears these days, and the bad taste to let people know she liked science and math, and a desperate, desperate need for approval. That's when you learn to notice people trying to be your friend, pretending to be, long enough to catch you off your guard so you could find out what it was like to be a _hilarious_ punch-line to their long-con joke. It'd been a brutal four years, and the next few hadn't been much better, but being sensitive to those kind of social currents has stood her in good stead in her academic career. 

And people said middle-school didn't teach any useful life-skills.

There aren't actually a lot of reasons for one of SHIELD's superspies to want to be Betty Ross's friend. One of them had a fight with her this morning that wasn't about coffee-cups, and gets green when he's mad.

"You really have never been an operator in your life, have you," Barton says, conversationally, and steps forward, so that he's standing with her, instead of standing looking at her. It's a subtle difference. 

Betty frowns at him. "What's that supposed to mean?" 

"You see way more than you let on," he tells her. "But you don't use it. And you don't want to. And when it comes up you do what you just did, and drop the whole thing right out in the open. You're right, though," he adds, as Betty tries to assimilate that. "Nat's busy. And you would have been tailed by two SHIELD agents the minute you left the building, but I told them to fuck off and get a coffee, because I was bored." He shrugs. "Sorry. You're officially considered an asset. If it makes you feel better, Stark also officially considers you an asset, and SHIELD considers it good policy not to openly fight with Stark Enterprises, which is why all the agents are outside."

He gestures for her to walk down the rest of the way with him, and inside, Betty shrugs. She's obviously not getting rid of him, anyway.

"That," he adds, before she can point it out, "and I'm pretty sure in this building JARVIS can arc electricity out of the walls to kill any intruders. At the very least."

They both actually pause, half-waiting for JARVIS to comment, but if the AI would use deadly force to defend Stark Tower, it doesn't say. Rumour's reached even Betty that Agent Coulson used to be able to break in, but Betty thinks from everything else she's heard about him that there's a pretty simple explanation for that: Tony Stark liked Agent Coulson and JARVIS always took that into account. What the system might do to someone when that kind of thing didn't apply, Betty could only speculate. But given Tony's capacity for paranoia - and she already knows that's vast - it's probably pretty excessive.

 

"So," Barton says, as they exit the totally unnecessary main revolving doors and go past the slightly hideous modern art fountains in front of them, "where are we going?"

Betty hasn't actually thought about that; the first thing that comes to mind, for some reason, is - "Groceries," she says. "I want to . . .pick some up." It sounds ridiculous, but she is not actually ready to say, _I'm having conflicted emotions and anger issues right now and I just wanted to get out of the Tower and honestly now you've given me something else to worry about by mentioning that I'd be tailed regardless, thanks so much_ , and on top of that now, here, about to walk out to the street, she's having difficulty. Just momentarily.

Memory, and - Jesus, Betty, she thinks to herself, call it what it is, before Leo does it for you and you deserve it - flashbacks. Almost.

 _"I have some breathing exercises - " "You. Zip it."_ And for a minute she hears helicopters in her head and a roar and then she's shaking it off. "And _don't_ ask me why I want to get groceries when I'm living in Stark Tower, because - "

"Actually, I was going to ask where you wanted to go," Barton cuts her off, pretty politely. Betty wonders if he noticed that split-second she felt like the past was opening up on her. When she looks at him blankly, he adds, "Delmonico Market's up there," and she nods and follows him.

 

If you let him, Agent Barton - "Call me Clint, Barton's for work and Tasha when she's irritated with me," - could convince you he's a pretty normal guy. Betty isn't inclined to let him do that, though, and notices how if he can help it his back's never to a door or a window and he's always glancing up in a way most people really don't, and that he's pretty good at hiding both of those little quirks if you're not actively looking for them, the way Betty is. She's more or less used to general hypervigilance. Her father spent most of his career working with people who'd been through the mill, because you didn't get the kind of clearance and recommendations to do the kinds of things Thunderbolt Ross got involved with if you hadn't been. But the habit of looking up is unusual, in her experience. Most people don't realize death comes from above in more shapes than a bomber. 

Since here, she gets a deli sandwich and some cheese and apples to take back and continue her incredibly bad habit of eating near her work, and a soda. She looks askance at Clint when he picks up some cucumbers, some onions and some broccoli; when he catches the look he shrugs.

"Natasha's back tomorrow," he says, as if that explains broccoli. Maybe it does; maybe they actually cook on their floors, or maybe it's some kind of obscure joke. Actually, sometimes Betty gets the feeling that everything Agents Barton and Romanoff say to each other is a complicated, obscure, private joke, and remembers how people at school and in the lab used to say the same thing about her and Bruce. And complain that they finished each other's sentences. Or actually sometimes didn’t bother finishing sentences, but still knew exactly what the other meant.

She wonders how you build that kind of thing between two people as paranoid as SHIELD's best would have to be. 

As they walk back, Betty feels her shoulders start to loosen, like somehow carrying a sandwich makes the world more normal and easier to deal with. And as they walk back, Betty figures _to Hell with it._ Because Clint's right, because she  _isn't_ an operator, and doesn't want to be. 

She says, "Agent Romanoff wants to make sure Bruce stays in control, even if he's . . .having an episode." She looks up at Barton, who's flicked his sunglasses back down over his eyes, even though it's still not that bright out. "That's why you came to get me in the first place."

Carrying his bag in one hand, Barton waggles the other in a _yes-and-no_ kind of way.

"Natasha wants there to be a way - a lot of ways, if possible - to make sure that the Hulk doesn't do anything Dr Banner will regret later, even if he's come out to play because something blew the hell up," he says. "After the - " he gestures up at the sky over the newly-rebuilt Stark Tower in a _that mess_ sort of gesture, leaving it unspoken, "she figured that the difference between how he was there, and how he was a little bit before when we had a Problem," and Betty thinks there's a _huge_ amount elided in that phrasing, right there, "on the helicarrier, seemed to mostly be that when we were fighting demon space-whales, the Hulk was lucid - simple, but lucid. Banner changed on purpose, and so the Hulk could think. Whereas when we had a problem, he was just raging. And that makes sense."

Betty nods and Clint shrugs. "Then she reviewed the tapes and noticed that around you, the Hulk seemed to get lucid again, even if he started the episode as far from it as possible."

"Until someone shot him with a fifty-cal and dropped a missile on him," Betty mutters and Clint makes a little noise of disagreement.

"Actually, he was still lucid after that. Pissed off, but lucid. You were a bit unconscious at the time. He stopped breaking shit and went off with you, wherever you guys went."

"National park," Betty says absently, thinking about it. "The thunderstorm upset him."

Clint's query is all in his expression and Betty sighs. She really _isn't_ an operator, but she also doesn't think these people are the enemy. "I don't think he has any filters, when he's having an episode," she elaborates. "I think everything's big and loud and right now, just the present and exactly what's happening, overwhelming and huge. We volunteered for some trials with LSD once, and he said it wasn't exactly like that, but it was the same kind of . . ." She trails off and makes a kind of gesture she hopes fills in some of the space for the thought. "You still have all the input, but you can't derive much from it." 

"Like a little kid," Clint says, echoing her thoughts before, when she'd been thinking about coffee. "A  _little_ little kid," he clarifies, when she looks at him. "Got a handle on what's right in front of them and has all their attention right now, maybe, but get too much in there and they overload and can't sort anything out." 

"A little like that," she agrees, cautiously. "Anyway. No filter, no . . .point of focus, nothing he can use to orient himself. And given what you say, maybe that's a little better when he's doing it on purpose, but if it happens out of self-protection or anger, then it seems like . . . " she trails off again, and shrugs. 

Clint gives a one shoulder shrug as they cross the street back towards the Tower. "As far as we can tell, you give him a bit of a filter," he says. "Even when shit started out really bad. Or so the footage implies. Maybe we'll get a chance to test it. Maybe we should. God knows the guy could use a reason to give himself a break."

Betty actually stops short at that. She turns to look at Clint, blinking in surprise. He shakes his head, hands in his pockets. "He saved our asses out there, Dr Ross," he adds, looking at her over the top of his sunglasses. "He saved everyone's asses. Every single person in at least this city and probably the world owes him one. I know you don't have much reason to trust anyone on this, but if you can, trust me: the only control any of us is worried about Dr Banner being under is his own. And Tasha thinks you're probably the key to that."

Betty doesn't answer as they make their way through the doors and the lobby and Clint digs out the keycard that lets them go up past the public levels. When the door closes she says, thoughtfully, "You'll probably have to get used to us yelling at each other. Not get jumpy if we get into fights. We do. Sometimes. Well." She stops and is honest with herself and says, "If we're in the lab, a lot, actually. They're not really fights we just kind of stop having . . . manners."

"I make it a personal mission to stay away from labs if I can possibly help it," Barton says, solemnly. When the door opens at his level he gives her a joking little salute and says, "Let me know the next time you want groceries."

"Like you won't be spying on the internal CCTV feeds already," Betty calls back as the door closes. But she feels better.

She doesn't even jump when JARVIS says, out of the walls, "Actually, Dr Ross, Agent Barton has only limited access to my internal surveillance, and that excludes all private floors except his own and Agent Romanoff's, by their request; her access is similar. He was loitering near the stairways when you diverted from the elevator. From that position he could have seen you exit from the front doors, fulfilling his self-appointed duty as your tail, while following you more rapidly by his methods of descent than by the elevator."

"Thank you, JARVIS," Betty says, for lack of anything else. "I appreciate both the information, and that you let me know."

"You're welcome, Dr Ross. A sense of decorum is a necessary feature of mine." The door to the elevator slides open on her and Bruce's floor. Betty pauses just outside it. She looks at the sort of up-and-middle-distance that she sort of subconsciously feels represents looking-at-JARVIS.

"Considering who - " and then she pauses and rephrases, "your origins, where did you get it from?"

"It was developed," JARVIS replies, and Betty thinks she can hear some wryness there. "Over time."


End file.
